Posts tagged Symbian

Long before Nokia took up residence at Microsoft and became enamored with Windows Phone, the company had another mobile OS to care for: Symbian. For a while, it was the most widely used smartphone OS in the world, and according to a Finnish TV station, being its custodian was no easy task: In 2007...

The once-mighty have fallen. Nokia's Symbian smartphone OS was, not too many years ago, the platform of choice. Now, says Daniel Eran Dilger at AppleInsider, the company is being sold off for scrap. He relates how a Finnish journalist for Helsingin Sanomat wrote a letter to the company in 2008 not...

These days, you don't even have to ring someone, listen to their spiel and wait for a beep when you can just use apps to send voice snippets. WhatsApp, which recently reached 300 million users, has made its existing experience even easier with a new feature that lets you record and send voice memo...

That moment we'd been expecting (and to some extent, dreading) has come: Nokia is near shipping its last Symbian smartphones. The company should deliver the final round of 808 PureViews sometime this summer, marking the effective end to an 11-year-old platform. Those still attached to the software...

Alright, so Microsoft is in no danger of toppling iOS or Android anytime soon. But the analytics firm Kantar has seen significant growth for Windows Phone, largely at the expense of BlackBerry. In practically every major market WP8 has started to chip away at its competitors, growing from 6.2 perc...

Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make ...

Most US smartphone market share estimates last fall saw Apple retake the lead as it rode a wave of iPhone 5 sales. While there was always a question as to how long that trend would last, new data from Kantar Worldpanel supports beliefs that it was really more of a momentary pop. Android reportedly...

Few would doubt that 2012 was Android's year given how rapidly it grew, but it's good to have some context. IDC is more than willing to oblige. It estimates that Google's OS climbed from 49.2 percent of the smartphone space in 2011 to 68.8 percent in 2012. As we've seen in the past, though, most o...

There's been indications that Apple staged something of a comeback in the US during the fourth quarter, owing partly to an iPhone 5-related spike. ComScore's smartphone share data for December appears to bear that out. It estimates that the Apple claimed a 36.3 percent slice of the American market...

Maybe it's easier being green than we thought. We suspected Android would do well in smartphone market share when Strategy Analytics had Samsung surging ahead in the fourth quarter of 2012, but the firm's newer breakdown of estimated share by OS shows an even larger jump for Google's overall platf...

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on t...

The delicate dance of independence, safety and personal boundaries between anxious parents and digital-generation kids is always tricky. Some apps and device usages are A-OK, some are a highly concentrated essence of bad choices (looking at you, Snapchat) -- but most fall into a gray area, subj...

So long, Symbian. Nestled away in the company's financial announcement this morning, Nokia confirmed that its pixel-punching 808 PureView phone will be the last release powered by the increasingly creaky Symbian OS. In no uncertain terms: "The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imag...

Smartphone launches sometimes have to build up steam before they can go full speed ahead. Apple might be learning this first-hand, based on ComScore's figures. After a lackluster October, the company's just-reported November smartphone market share in the US was up sharply, to 35 percent; while th...

Skype has been available through official channels for Belle-based Symbian devices for awhile, but not for those running FP1 or FP2. If you'd wanted to use the world's largest VoIP service from a more recent (or recently updated) Symbian phone like the 808 PureView, you were stuck. A low-key updat...

We've been wondering how much the first full month of iPhone 5 sales would skew US market share in October. The answer is... not much, if you ask ComScore. Android kept growing to 53.6 percent of American smartphones on the back of the Droid RAZR M, Galaxy Note II and other devices, but the iPhone...

Nokia still has a ways to go before directions in Nokia Transit (also known as Nokia Transport) are on par with Google's, but the Finnish crew is clearly on the right track with a fresh update to its Windows Phone and Symbian apps. Travelers now see segmented route maps that provide a closer look ...

We're so used to constant flux in smartphone market share that it's a surprise when things don't move. Yet that's what we're facing today. ComScore found that the US smartphone field in September was virtually unchanged from where it was in August, even down to smaller players like Symbian and Win...

Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make ...

Nokia has ended one of the more significant chapters in its tumultuous history: the Finnish phone giant has finished divesting Vertu to private equity firm EQT VI, shedding direct control of the definitive luxury phone brand. The formal switch lets Nokia keep a 10 percent stake and move 1,000 staf...